Motley Fool Co-Founder David Gardner Reviews Stock Picks

In this special episode, Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner reflects on the d results, sharing 10 fresh lessons from both the wins and the whiffs

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A full transcript is below

Well, now the calendars ticked forward one year later

How have those picks continued to fare now with 12 more months on the clock and what fresh lessons can we pry from their wins and whiffs

Let's take a quick victory lap, a few humbling detours and of course, bank some new Rule Breaker insights

Welcome back to Rule Breaker

I don't listen to every one of my

In fact, I think I listen maybe every seven or eight

Sometimes I'm on a drive somewhere, and I'm, what did it sound last week

I did listen to last week's podcast

I hope you got a chance to do so, as well, because that really was one of my favorite in recent memory to think the Rule Breaker community, the Motley Fool community that we've built up over time, and you taking the time to steps you've taken toward financial freedom

For you to that out through this podcast with your stories and your inspirations, really reminded me of why we do what we do at the Motley Fool

Nine phenomenal notes, not a long podcast, either

It was pretty breezy, but sharing your lessons, tips, and guidance for people for really all of us, we all benefit when we hear any one of us take a step toward financial freedom

It might be a lesson personally applicable, or it might be something you can with a friend or family member

Last week's podcast, what you've done to create financial freedom, Volume 3, pretty sure that's a bestie

I brought it all together in a really special podcast a year ago this week

If you want to go back and listen, I totally encourage it

It's Reviewapalooza Ultima, 35 stock samplers in 10 and a half chapters

Well, as I said at the time, of course, I have all of those stock picks still in my spreadsheet, d with their performance, both individually as picks and then in aggregate for each sampler, and then in overall aggregate for all 35 stock samplers

I check in with that spreadsheet at least once a week just to see how things have shaped up because the real game of is not a three-year game

The real game of is, well, let's call it more a three-decade game

In fact, with the Motley Fool having just recently turned 32, we're now living the three decade plus apach, and as I look over that spreadsheet, I'm constantly enamored of the lessons we can learn together, and that's the focus of this podcast

I figured, last year after the July 4th podcast, I did a Reviewapalooza podcast

Why wouldn't I do the same thing again this year

Looking up and down my spreadsheet at the 35 stock samplers, what 10 lessons can we learn together

Ten points, 10 lessons this week

After 30 years of stock picking, this is my magnum opus

It's a lifetime of lessons distilled into one definitive guide

Each week until the book launches on September 16th, we're sharing a random excerpt

We break open the book to a random page and I read a few sentences

Here's this week's page Breaker preview, just a few sentences from very early on in the book. "It took years for me to articulate what started as intuition and eventually evolved into this question, why do the most esteemed investment books of the past often cause their readers to miss the best stocks of their own generation

I won't claim it's true of every revered book, but it's strikingly true for many. " That's this week's page Breaker preview to preorder my final word on stock picking shaped by three decades of market crushing success

Just type Rule Breaker into amazon

Com, Barnes and noble

Com or wherever you shop for fine books

You do need to be a Barnes and Noble member

I say, without further ado, let's get started

Number 1 is looking at the overall numbers for the 35 stock samplers

Well, here we are now one year later

The stock market has been very strong, and the historical numbers have gone up pretty dramatically

For Number 1 here, I'm going to be drawing a lesson for each of the points I'm making this week

But for Number 1, let's just do the numbers, then the lesson

That's now looking over all of these samplers, from the one picked 10 years ago to the one picked four years ago

I guess the lesson here for Number 1 is Rule Breaker continues to win grandly, not just three plus years and counting, but I'd say 32 plus years and counting

Especially for people who are new to or may have been taught that it would just be luck to beat the stock market

I hope your eyes are opening to the possibilities that can come to you when you're actually choiceful, when you decide to buy not all the stocks in an index fund, but the best stocks, the Rule Breakers

If you focus industry by industry on who are the innovators, what are the companies that meet the six traits of the Rule Breaker stock and when you buy them and you act a Rule Breaker investor, very different from the Wall Street crowd trading in and out of the market

When you act a Rule Breaker investor with Rule Breaker stocks, meaning you hold them, not just for three years, but 10, which is our time frame this week, you see the phenomenal returns that can come to you when you pursue this strategy

The lesson, very simply for Number 1 is this works, it wins grandly, and I predict these numbers continue to go up, I hope in an eye-popping way over the next decade

As I closed out each of the 35 stock samplers, after it its three-year tour of duty, I always pointed out that we're not selling these stocks just because the sampler is now

The gamification of my five stock samplers as three-year games just because that three years was doesn't ever mean that we would sell the companies at that point

I just didn't want to keep tracking them forever, every week, week in and week out

As I said, often, if all we did was review five stock samplers, we wouldn't do anything else on this podcast, but it is worth pointing out the incredible benefits that come from holding a decade plus

More to come on that point

Let's move to Point Number 2

Point Number 2 is looking over the 30 historically

When we closed it out last year, 19 of the 30 had beaten the market, which means 11 of the 35 stock samplers had lost to the market

It's fun to note now a year later, some of the winners have become losers, and some of the losers have become winners

We'll talk a little bit more that this week coming up

But even with some changing of the guard, it ends up as of today, of the 35 stock samplers historically now, not just three-year periods,19 of them are winning and 11 of them are losing to the market

Now, I hasten to add we're just talking beating the market, not whether you're making money overall

We'll talk more that later too

I say, if you make a pick and it beats the S&P, you were accurate

What I mean by that is, six times out of 10, you should be trying to beat the market on average

We'll talk some more that this week, too

You're always going to have losers

Losing to win is one of my most important themes for the world at large, whether we're talking, or life, you need to lose to win in this world, I believe

Get ready to lose as you build your own stock market portfolio because it's going to happen to you

But be aiming to be confident enough that you think you're going to beat the market the majority of the time

Don't speculate wildly hoping to strike it rich with some cryptobro portfolio

Maybe that works for some, but I think for me, anyway, as a Rule Breaker investor, focus solely on public market companies, on the stock market

I go in with a mentality, I've tried to that with you over the years to try to think you're going to beat the market with six out of 10 of your picks, and pick accordingly

I think it's fun to pull the lesson here from Point Number 2

The takeaway lesson is that's exactly what we up doing

Both as we closed down last year and reported that 19 of the 30 had beaten the market, and now a year later, some of them have flip-flopped in terms of who's winning and who's losing

Number 3 is that the worst ever of my five stock samplers was formerly five stocks for the coronavirus

This is a sampler I've talked a lot over the years

It was the most dramatic winner we'd ever seen in its first year

Not a single one of the five has been a winner

I presented them back in the day

I was having fun in reverse alphabetical order

I wish I could reverse the performance of these stocks, but Zillow Group, Wayfair, Impinj

This was reverse order by ticker symbol

Impinj is PI as a ticker symbol, Pegasystems, and then the worst of all, iRobot

Impinj, the best performer is 41 percentage points behind the market

Five stocks ride in the bull market, as a basket now, the worst five stock sampler ever

As a basket, they're up 6

Of course, some of them, iRobot, have done even worse, and one of them, Impinj, even doubled, but that wasn't enough

The stock market on average doubles every seven years, so if you have a stock that doubled after eight years, you're bably behind the market

What's the lesson from this changeover from five stocks for the coronavirus being the worst ever to five stocks riding the bull market, which, by the way, I was picking stocks that were at new highs as the stock market hit an all time high

Unfortunately, I didn't pick a single significant winner

But to me, the lesson for Number 3 here is stuff happens

Times change, and, in fact, change is the only constant

Now, the good news is, change worked against us here with Number 3

But let's now move to Number 4, where change has become our friend

Number 4, the best ever performer has also changed over in the year we've just

When we out Reviewapalooza Ultima last year, the best performer for its three-year period, had been five stocks the world needs right now

An absolutely phenomenal performance

But now when you look at all 30 of these five stock samplers and look at their full history, I did mention this, I think on the podcast last week or the week before, the greatest performer has become five stocks for April the giraffe

But the one just before.